Using Facebook, Craigslist, Ridejoy (a car-sharing service), and CouchSurfing, the aspiring architect spent some of her emergency money to buy a cheap ticket to New York which came with free Wi-Fi.

From there she hitched a lift with a photographer she met on Craigslist and used Facebook to sleep on a friend’s couch.

Thanks to Craiglist, she snared a bus ticket to Madison, Wisconsin where she met another couch surfer who drover her Minneapolis, continuing to use social media until she reached her final destination.

“This would have been impossible without social media,” she said.

And while hitchhiking may seem a crazy idea for a woman travelling alone, Ms Rule says she wouldn’t hesitate to do it again and hadn’t realised how vast the digital network was.

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